


Let's Talk About Brains, Baby

by iimpavid



Category: DCU (Comics), Original Work, Science - Fandom, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Aphasia, Brain Damage, Coma, Comatose, Crack, Fanwork Research & Reference Guides, Gen, Meta, Other, PTSD, Psychology, Recovery, Science, neuroscience
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-06
Updated: 2019-04-25
Packaged: 2019-10-05 17:09:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17329070
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iimpavid/pseuds/iimpavid
Summary: There are ways that brains work. The odds are, the way you're thinking probably isn't it*.*or maybe it totally is! Click through to find out!





	1. Resilience

**Author's Note:**

> I'm a big fan of Brains (TM). As such, I get super irate when topics in Psychology and/or Neuroscience are misrepresented in fiction. For years I've been railing to my friends about this via instant messaging platforms and now I've finally gotten my shit together enough to start posting coherent meta about these topics. "Chapters" will be added sporadically.

([Crossposted to Pillowfort](https://www.pillowfort.io/posts/405676))

You may find yourself asking:

> Rae, you insufferable pedant, are you really doing this? Are you really making a post series all about how great swathes of fandom are Doing Things Wrong?

Yes, yes I am. I have no fear.

First up, we’re going to be discussing the concepts of trauma and resilience. The example I’m going to use for this is Bucky Barnes, from Marvel’s _Captain America_ comics and films, but please know that these general concepts can apply to a whole wide range of characters. Got it? Good. 

The DSM-V defines trauma as events that involve "actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence" in its section on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Now, PTSD is no laughing matter but trauma in general is not enough to guarantee PTSD and I am here to propose to you an alternative: perhaps your favorite traumatized character does not develop PTSD but instead does alright in the aftermath. Perhaps they even experience [Post-Traumatic Growth](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4866987/)! 

This sounds counterintuitive, but that’s because the narratives we’ve had shoveled into our eye holes about trauma are all pretty much the same: trauma is survived and the survivor is left irrevocably scarred, broken, and miserable. This is a shitty narrative (for many reasons!) that contradicts the reality that most people emerge from trauma Pretty Okay because humans are resilient!

In psychology, [“resilience” is the concept of “how much terrible shit a human being can put up with”](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1524838005277438), more or less.[ It is the reason that 83% of combat veterans return home and don’t have PTSD](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2891773/). It is the ability of some individuals to seemingly “snap back” from adversity or to adapt to ongoing stress because they are bolstered by certain thoughts, beliefs, habits, and inherent traits which allow them to cope. 

Now, to bring the fandom content back into this: I’ve seen a lot of fanfic that writes Bucky Barnes as if his traumatic experiences left him an empty husk with no sense of identity or selfhood. Is this realistic?

  **Nope**. And, frankly, anyone who thinks so has a blatant disregard for the character that we see on the screen and on the page. Yes, that's right, it's time for Rae to Harp on Canon. Your mileage may vary.

Across mediums, Bucky is shown to have strong social supports throughout his life and during WWII: He has family back in the States who are well-supported and welcoming; he makes close friends during the war (The Howling Commandos, anyone?) and maintains his tendency to be an incorrigible flirt; and he shows a surprising sense of humor and sarcasm. Everything about his character shows that he is well-equipped to cope with a large amount of terrible shit.

Furthermore, Bucky is shown to be a fully-fledged character in possession of a strong sense of self-identity after the events of Winter Soldier. He comes out of his stint with HYDRA a fully-fledged and functional adult. We see him maintaining an apartment and shopping, presumably with money that he’s earned through “normal” means, and interacting with other people in mundane, healthy ways. He’s shown as keeping journals as a way to process the deluge of memories from his trauma–- [writing increases emotional expressiveness which has a positive effect on coping!](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3830620/)

In the comics, it is established that HYDRA had to continually lesion his brain because it would heal itself thanks to the supersoldier serum and he would more easily break through the conditioning constantly being applied to him. The dude’s personality was **so salient** (meaning: present, fully-formed, strong, etc.) that it required _constant brain damage to suppress it_. Post-HYDRA, dude still has a personality, the ability to form positive interpersonal relationships (did anyone else read his team up with Hawkeye?), and is generally fully functional while still going through recognizable recovery. 

What this means is that Bucky Barnes is one resilient son of a bitch.

What this means is that there is no canonical basis for writing Barnes as an empty husk of a human being who was left “broken” by his experiences. That’s just lazy writing and is disrespectful to his character. Please, I'm begging you, stop doing that.

 Additional thought for consideration: **Meta to the text(s), this “trauma left me broken” narrative is highly disrespectful to actual survivors.**

In my own experience, I have never met a survivor of trauma (sexual assault, abuse, war) who was left catatonic by their experience. Rather, they are angry. … Well, “angry” is not putting it strongly enough. They’re incandescent with rage, suppressed or otherwise, because of what they’ve endured. Sure, a person might be agoraphobic and keep a baseball bat by the front door but they are still, at their, core furious about what has happened to them.

Consider again the Winter Soldier. Every time he is on screen and about to be conditioned it is clear that he is incandescent with rage as only a trauma survivor can be. When he is being given the biteguard before being electrocuted, the look on his face and the bodily expressed discomfort of the technician clearly demonstrate that the Soldier has probably bitten off others’ fingers before. When Zemo is reciting the painful, punishing trigger phrase (causing Bucky’s brain to experience pain that will only be stopped by obedience) he enters a violent rage in self-defense. Bucky Barnes isn’t a husk of a person; he’s fucking pissed off.

And I recognize that _this may not be true of all survivors_ \-- however it is a disservice to survivors to support the narrative that they should be left inhuman in the wake of their trauma. 

 So, anyway, those are my academic-ish feelings on resilience and trauma. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk! Next time we'll be discussing Traumatic Brain Injury and how it is _**literally always reductive and does not ever grant special powers or memory enhancement**_!

Sources: 

  * the literal DSM-V
  * linked free articles/studies above
  * too many comics/films
  * my degree in Counseling Psychology




	2. Coma & You

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You may find yourself asking: "Rae, you insufferable pedant, are you really doing this? Are you really making a post series all about how great swathes of fandom are Doing Things Wrong?"
> 
> Yes, yes I am. 
> 
> I have no fear.

Let me preface this with two very important facts about brain injuries: first, they are _always_ reductive. This means that they never add anything traditionally considered super heroic to the human experience or even remotely helpful. Second, their prognosis-- progression and course of healing-- is very difficult to predict and is dependent upon the type of TBI, location, severity, immediacy of treatment, and so forth.

Got it?

Good.

Keep that in the back of your mind forever whenever we talk about TBI’s or you want to write about them. Let it inspire you to do your homework.

Now let's talk about Jason Todd. Specifically, let's look at how folks seem to misunderstand the fact that Superboy punching a hole in the universe brought him back _from_ being 1) dead and, more importantly 2) embalmed/organless. This means that Jason Todd is _alive_ and has functional viscera including a _brain_. What the hell does that have to do with anything?

A lot of things when you consider that his post-resurrection state is described rather irresponsibly by some folks as "comatose" or "vegetative".

 

There are multiple definitions of life in the medical field which often wigs people out but it's pretty clear that Jason Todd was alive in most senses of the word at this point in his existence: able to move around unaided, care for himself, and generally operate like a living being even if the kid had approximately 0 quality of life. Describing him as "vegetative" is a fundamental misunderstanding of the term.

Please allow me to introduce you to my friend, the Glasgow Coma Scale over on the left. This is a tool used by neurologists to diagnose just how severely a person is affected by their brain injury. [ This graphic doesn’t show diagnostic outcomes so you can read more about them here at traumaticbraininjury.com ](http://www.traumaticbraininjury.com/symptoms-of-tbi/glasgow-coma-scale/).

A _persistent vegetative state_ is diagnosed when a person scores a 2 or lower on the Glasgow Coma Scale. [ The New England Journal of Medicine ](http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199405263302107#t=article) defines a Persistent Vegetative state as a state in which the patient displays:

> _(1) no evidence of awareness of self or environment and an inability to interact with others; (2) no evidence of sustained, reproducible, purposeful, or voluntary behavioral responses to visual, auditory, tactile, or noxious stimuli; (3) no evidence of language comprehension or expression; (4) intermittent wakefulness manifested by the presence of sleep-wake cycles; (5) sufficiently preserved hypothalamic and brain-stem autonomic functions to permit survival with medical and nursing care; (6) bowel and bladder incontinence; and (7) variably preserved cranial-nerve reflexes (pupillary, oculocephalic, corneal, vestibulo-ocular, and gag) and spinal reflexes._

Throughout his time shambling around Gotham post-resurrection, Jason is depicted as being nonverbal and withdrawn but he is fully functional as a non-vegetative human would expect to be. He responds to external stimuli and _upright and walking, looking around him and taking in visual stimuli and presumably also hearing things_. He responds to his body’s hunger cues, seeking out food. Hell, he gets into a street fight when a memory gets triggered. Nearly all of these things are “sustained, reproducible, purposeful, [and] voluntary” actions to some degree.

Jason Todd absolutely is not in a vegetative state. 

I get it. It can be rough describing someone who just came back from the dead. The disorientation, the sensory overload, the confusion-- but that’s okay! This is why I’m here to make your life a little easier. The correct term for the kinds of behavior that Jason displays is  _catatonic_.

According to the Diagnostic Statistical Manual-- a.k.a. the DSM-V, a.k.a. American psychologists’ holy text of choice of which I proudly own a copy-- _catatonic behavior_ is “a marked decrease in reactivity to the environment”. This can include being mute, moving around when prompted or independently as if in a daze, and having stereotyped movements such as repeatedly bending and unbending a limb. [You can read more about this online here](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5183991/).

Jason is a good fit for the mutism and stupor subtypes of catatonic behavior because he shows a lack of verbal and motor responses to stimuli. Otherwise, however, he is mobile and able to care for himself with some prompting from others in his environment. At one point, he actually defends himself and beats the crap out of some jerk in an alley! What a badass zombie kid!That's not even mentioning the fact that he literally clawed his way out of his own grave, a thing that he's let no one forget since.

[I'd include screenshot evidence or at least comic titles but _wow it is impossible to find sources on panels from comics you don't physically own_. If there's some trick, some mystical google-fu I'm missing, someone please tell me, I beg you.]

Okay, guys, I'm peanuts at conclusions. The big TL;DR boils down to:

  * If someone is moving and responding to stimuli they shouldn't be described as "vegetative"
  * Do your research



**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The comments section is OPEN and READY.
> 
> If you have any questions about a topic I've covered please let me know!
> 
> If you find errors in my research summaries please let me know!
> 
> If you found this helpful please let me know!
> 
> If you want to see something specific please let me know!


	3. Aphasia & You

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tl;dr aphasia is a disorder or symptom of a disorder that means your brain does not understand language as readily, or that your ability to access language already stored in your brain (by reading/hearing/speaking/writing) gets all muddled when you go to use it. The two most-common forms of aphasia are Wernicke’s aphasia and Broca’s aphasia.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I keep using Jason Todd in my case studies. I'm sorry.

 

By now we all know why we’re here. I’m going to ramble into the void about a neuroscientific or psychological concept illustrated with a character from popular media. Usually with a slightly combative tone. And if I’m lucky y’all might take something useful away from this.

Ready to go? Let’s talk about aphasia.

Aphasia is a subject near and dear to my heart; having a minor case of it myself, I am relentlessly irked when people misrepresent it. I understand that y’all’s hearts are in the right place and you’d like to have some more neurodivergent folks in your fiction but do yourselves a favor and do your homework first.

 _What's aphasia?_ You ask. _iimpavid, why do we care?_

We care because one time I saw someone write about Jason Todd having aphasia as if it were a type of amnesia and it annoyed me. As for what aphasia is, well, the TL;DR is that aphasia is a disorder that means your brain does not understand language as readily  _or_ that your ability to access language already stored in your brain (by reading/hearing/speaking/writing) gets all muddled when you go to use it. The two most-common forms of aphasia are Wernicke’s aphasia and Broca’s aphasia.

Oh yeah, this is gonna be a fun infodump for y'all. 

Don't worry there are linked videos if you get bored. 

  * [Wernicke’s aphasia](https://www.aphasia.org/aphasia-resources/wernickes-aphasia/) affects comprehension of language. If you’ve got Wernicke’s you’re going to struggle understanding and using complex language and this can present in many ways [as seen in this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oef68YabD0). Wernicke’s makes it impossible for a person to read in severe cases. Consider having characters who prefer radio shows or audio books if their reading has been severely impacted.
    * Immediately after my own stroke trying to read text longer than one line of sans serif font felt like looking at a Jackson Pollock painting-- utterly incomprehensible, spattered gibberish. I, personally, also have the fun experience of being utterly convinced certain words aren’t real (“minute” and “correct” being two examples).
  * [Broca’s aphasia](https://www.aphasia.org/aphasia-resources/brocas-aphasia/) affects the production of language. It is extremely hard to speak or otherwise express yourself when you have this disorder, [as seen here.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aplTvEQ6ew)
    * A person with Broca’s aphasia might “lose” a word such as “clock” and substitute it with a word that sounds similar or has a similar meaning-- my go-to is “time calculator”. An aphasic person may not have the word they want but we get pretty creative in coming up with what might suit in its place.



To make it even better there are multiple types of aphasia out there! You can have strictly one type but frequently they blend together. This is because everything in these areas is physically _pretty close together_.

Wernicke's and Broca's Areas in the brain _are_ separate but they are both part of the Left Medial-Temporal Lobe, the region that is partially responsible for language processing and production. They are interconnected. Additionally, they're connected to parts of the brain responsible for processing auditory stimulus as well-- and the visual paths of the brain cut right through the Medial Temporal Lobe (not pictured but trust me it's there). Nothing in the brain is "localized" (think fenced off like the suburbs); rather functions in the brain, like language processing, are usually "generalized", lots of regions working together in tandem and with lots of overlap (think the organized chaos of a major city).

Check out the [ National Aphasia Association ](https://www.aphasia.org/) to learn more. 

Now, how do you _get_ aphasia?

Aphasia is both a disorder unto itself and a symptom of other disorders. So "causes" can include (but are not limited to):

    * traumatic brain injury (as discussed here) 
      * including but not limited to damage caused by high fevers, drug use, brain bleeds, and concussive trauma
    * neurodevelopment disorders  
      * including but not limited to: Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, ADD/ADHD, Asperger's syndrome, Alzheimer's, Childhood Apraxia



And at last we come to my next and less-important point, the reason you bothered clicking on this at all: iimpavid whining about fandom misrepresenting brain-related things.

Jason Todd, after being “restored” in the Lazarus Pit, doesn’t have aphasia. At least, not in canon, for a very simple and straightforward reason... 

He speaks Portuguese (albeit poorly). 

[ According to current research (there’s not much)](https://oup.silverchair-cdn.com/oup/backfile/Content_public/Journal/brain/121/10/10.1093_brain_121.10.1841/1/1211841.pdf?Expires=1493946388&Signature=g-apnZCbFjQcu7r1ksju18pO~GFw6uqjlCMt2gs3zgMGfUVRakJ9xJYSuqGByGWuJp8TKm-6X2qtPByyf8vVXEgf3TFz0l4waqpAZoLZAzdDgeB2QL2J0pN5h6NO-Zk9NRBr99WM2EE1Ax3hsiKkHstfTHnx3fMpQt79DqmI-nIV06R0OcngwaAF0YLSbS3Ox4IY4OQfcvi1d2EThWYn8Rk-1OjkBMtQXg5DsRRsazN3EZ3EI9IuUAT8DpLzIl-IHO6X-Njll8x~2gXGswbznTCikgT8tk25-A2uWiYXIBugsZpM-u0Cn2aqMv4k6Nao5PIc0y9hmAUaMR-UMl0POg__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAIUCZBIA4LVPAVW3Q) it’s reasonably unlikely that, if he were severely aphasic, language acquisition would have been possible. According to the DC Fandom Wiki, the dude speaks five additional languages fluently and with the exception of his mutism immediately after being resurrected (which I discussed in the previous chapter) he shows no difficulty comprehending or producing language.

Prior to his death/resurrection it is unlikely that Jason is aphasic either, no matter how much drugging and boozing his mother did when he is in utero. He's shown to be at the top of his class when Bruce sticks him in private school, reading Jane Austen _as a middle schooler_ for fun. According to AO3 user It_MightBe_Love, a linguist by trade, "never mind that Jason was exposed to multiple languages as a child (because we know that Crime Alley is a melting pot), his fluency in multiple languages as a late teen/young adult is enough I would say with _authority_ that he did not suffer from any developmental delays" which, I think, sums things up nicely.

There’s just no evidence for such a diagnosis. Sorry folks. 

If you want to write an aphasic character do your research first. Read the accounts of folks with aphasia. Look at art we’ve created. Study up on what it’s like to have this disorder especially as a young person. Because let's be honest with ourselves here there's hardly anybody writing fanfic about old folks who have strokes-- usually it's brain injury or drug use behind our faves acting in neurodivergent ways.

Please take this information, use it as a springboard for your own research, spread it out into the wilds, and write brain damaged characters to your little hearts' content! And, if you do, please send me the link so I can compile a reclist of Fic That Gets Brains Right. 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You know the drill!
> 
> Did you find this helpful? Did you find it not helpful? Do you have corrections for me? Do you have suggestions of what I should ramble about next? 
> 
> If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, please pull up a chair in the comments section. Let's talk!

**Author's Note:**

> Please leave a comment if:  
> \- you liked this  
> \- you found this information useful  
> \- you didn't find this information useful AND have suggestions on how I can improve  
> \- you have contradictory evidence to something I said (I love learning!)  
> \- you have additional topics you'd like to see me rant about


End file.
